What is Junkipedia?
Junkipedia is digital public infrastructure for civic listening. Understanding how problematic content such as misinformation, hate speech, or junk news impact society requires shared tools to identify and archive that content. Junkipedia is a technology platform that enables manual and automated collection of data from across the spectrum of digital communication platforms including open social media, fringe networks, and closed messaging apps. The system is powered by the active engagement of a large and diverse network of civic-minded stakeholders from the civil rights, journalism, and academic communities. Funding for Junkipedia will provide increased technical capacity to support more platforms and users, and will enable an expansion of efforts to recruit and train a wider range of contributors to the system.
How does it work?
Junkipedia enables organizations to monitor for, report, analyze, and respond to problematic content on social media in an easy-to-use, structured system that supports a range of methods to get data into and out of the platform. Users can build monitoring feeds based on their specific target area based on sources and terms relevant to the type of problematic content they want to understand. Users can report content they find within the Junkipedia monitoring platform, or found anywhere online using a variety of tiplines to submit content via the web, email, SMS, Slack, and WhatsApp. Organizations using the platform can share their content with any or all of the other organizations using Junkipedia to reduce duplication of effort, spot trends across communities, and enable real-time situational awareness about the evolution and spread of misinformation narratives.
Collaboration across institutions
Junkipedia already has over 100 organizations using the platform to share or investigate narratives and instances of misinformation. We work with several existing coalitions focused on this problem to ensure that information flows across platforms and gets where it needs to go. We partner with the Stanford Internet Observatory for both their Election Integrity Partnership, and the Virality Project to enable their analysts to monitor across networks, and receive inputs from our network of civil rights non-profits and ethnic media reporters monitoring non-english content in underserved communities.. We supported First Draft’s 2020 election misinformation effort centered on their CrossCheck slack community by providing the platform for their volunteer network to submit incidents, and then pipe the resulting information into the proper state-focused channels for rapid response work to understand election misinformation. Junkipedia also powers the Common Cause Election Protection Coalition, which trained thousands of volunteers across the US to monitor and report misinformation about voter suppression and election integrity and produce social media outreach and inoculation messages to counter problematic content. We work with many newsrooms to help them directly monitor for mis- and disinformation, and we provide them with the ability to see the incidents and narratives submitted by all the other partners to ensure they have context and insight to inform their reporting.